Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: thoughtful
  • Music: Pink, "Funhouse."

5 reasons I love writing.

I'm a writer. I've been a writer for as long as I've had a grasp of written language, although my earliest works were, admittedly, not all that complex. I get asked "when did you start writing?" pretty commonly in interviews, and my response is always something along the lines of "I have no idea, in the womb, maybe, I don't know." Because really, I don't.

So as we continue our countdown (five days! Sweet pumpkin pie, five days!), here's today's list:

5 Reasons I Love Writing.

5. Stephen King put it best when he said that writing is like a form of telepathy. I make things up, I write them down, and then you can see them, in your mind. You "hear" dialog that I wrote. You "meet" people that I invented. When I write, I am Emma Frost, and that is awesome.

4. Writing continually surprises me. No matter how long I do it, no matter how much time I spend working to improve, I still find myself staring at things on the page and going "whoa, where did that come from?"

3. Writing comes with a very concrete and visible reward for hard work. If I write 2,000 words, I have 2,000 words that I didn't have before. If I write a book, dude, there is now a book in the world that didn't exist before I started typing. Me! I made that! It's incredibly fulfilling. Very few things in life are this immediately fulfilling.

2. I have to work to write. It's my hobby and what I do to relax and it makes me happy, but it's also work. If I don't revise, edit, check my spelling, check my continuity, and basically do hard labor, I don't get good books. I feel like I've done something when a story is finished, and that's amazing.

1. When I'm writing, I make all the rules. I don't think there's anything better than that.
Tags: a local habitation, contemplation, editing, good things, making lists, proofreading, toby daye, writing
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  • 52 comments

spectralbovine

February 25 2010, 16:52:50 UTC 7 years ago

When I'm writing, I make all the rules. I don't think there's anything better than that.
I think that is what struck me when I wrote "Polter-Cow." I could make my characters do anything! I WAS THE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE!

rysmiel

February 25 2010, 17:02:31 UTC 7 years ago

Your characters would seem to be less unruly than mine, then. Making mine do things is not at all easy sometimes. ("Oh, look, there went another outline of where I thought the plot was going... ")

mariadkins

February 25 2010, 17:07:06 UTC 7 years ago

that's one of the reasons i can't outline. it's pointless. my characters have minds of their own. i think it's impossible (??) to outline for character-driven stories. imho.

spectralbovine

February 25 2010, 17:20:55 UTC 7 years ago

Well, I was in high school at the time. Since then I've learned that you don't tell the characters what to do, you wait for them to tell you what they're going to do.

seanan_mcguire

February 26 2010, 16:02:01 UTC 7 years ago

Bingo.